Friends on April 19th the first part of Living World Season 1 dropped called Flame and Frost. I was so exceptionally excited to be able to experience this, and for me at least it did not disappoint. Some weeks back I covered what I considered to be the biggest challenges facing someone trying to get into Guild Wars 2, and the one that I highlighted as being the biggest was the huge hole in the story. The personal story of the core game is essentially one of saying goodbye to Destiny’s Edge and the rising if your own legend. By the time Living World Season 2 comes along you have an entire cast of characters that have been caught up in your wake and are given no introduction to them. This felt exceptionally jarring as I needed to understand where all of these people suddenly came from, and the answer is… Living World Season 1 was that introduction. In fact it seems to almost entirely be built around giving us the backstories of this new cast of companions that would ultimately be known as Dragon’s Watch.
What Living World Season 1 Episode 1 offers is about two or three hours worth of gameplay in total if you are pushing through it quickly. There were I believe four combat focused story instances, a few of them being rather lengthy. This is then combined with a good deal of story asides like this scene in Rytlock’s office. Then there is of course what I understand to be the original vehicle for a lot of the interaction… a series of email messages sent to the player that trigger progression in the story. I am not sure how much this version differs from the original version, but I feel like the team has done a pretty good job of taking what was ultimately a temporary event and packaging it up in the Living World format we are used to. For a moment however… can we just stop and marvel at how wide eyed and young Rox looks in this model? I knew the characters aged and changed over time, but going back like this it is staggering how many subtle changes have been made along the way. Rox has always been one of my favorite characters and I’ve loved every moment of her interactions during this story so far.
I’m also please as can be at just how many players are out in the world doing this content, or were doing this when the servers came back up on Tuesday. I popped in over lunch and did part of it, and then finished things up that evening. There is a tangible excitement in the community right now and it is infectious. Good things are happening and Arena Net has been nailing the communications with their new series of blog posts. Having a regular channel of information to the players is extremely important, the Destiny 2 community would not be nearly as cohesive as it is without the “TWAB” or “This Week at Bungie” a series of blog posts that come out on Thursdays. Seeing meaningful updates and forward momentum every few weeks is exceptionally important and I have to say I am enjoying watching this sleeping giant waking up. The faltering of World of Warcraft has caused a chain of events that I am not sure can really be stopped. So many players got disillusioned and branched out to explore the other games that were available in the genre… and it feels like ALL communities benefited by this not just Final Fantasy XIV.
We will have to wait until May 24th before we get to experience Episode 2, but given how fast time moves right now… that will be here before we know it. I have never played through content in Guild Wars 2 more than once on a single character, but I am honestly contemplating playing through LW1E1 again just to soak it in a little more deeply. I have to say the battles were extremely fun and I have some deep feelings about characters and their origins that I never had before. For years I have never quite understood why Braham as much of a dick as he ended up being at times. Now I know without a doubt that he had good reason and honestly it is probably a miracle that he is as functional as he is currently. It also is doing nothing to improve my opinions of Destiny’s Edge so far, but they were kind of awful to begin with.
If you never got to experience Living World Season 1, and also always struggled to get engaged with the story and characters of the game… then I highly suggest you check this out. It is providing the context behind actions that I really needed. It is providing a patch for the gaping hole in the story that the game desperately needed. This is a good call on the part of Arena Net and I am hoping that when we finally reach the end of this sequence that we get a glorious launch of Guild Wars 2 on Steam to christen the arrival at the end. If my math is correct we will be getting the final piece of the season around the time of the 10th anniversary of the game. I really think that would be the ideal time to welcome brand new players from Steam. Having a clear story progression is key, because your average player is not going to crawl through the wiki to try and piece together the details.
I am so freaking engaged right now, and seemingly picked the ideal time to get back into this game. I am still slowly catching up with Living World Season 5 and looking forward to starting Cantha with a clean conscience. I however was more than happy to take a quick break to get those missing bits of story. What are your thoughts about Living World Season 1 if you are playing through it? Did you also feel it was a rousing success, or did you find issues with it? Drop me a line below.
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Good Morning Friends! Thanks so much for all the comments yesterday. I always feel weird talking about “milestones”, like I am being overly self congratulatory. I honestly got up yesterday and struggled a bit as to whether or not to make that post or throw out a new Mixtape Monday, which incidentally will be released next Monday. I am still very deep into Guild Wars 2 and enjoying the heck out of it. I’ve wrapped up Living World Season 4 and am now chipping away at Living World Season 5 aka the Icebrood Saga. This season definitely feels like more than your average Living World Season, but not quite an expansion. It does make me wonder if there was a conversation happening at the studio about maybe just doing seasonal content going forward rather than expansion drops.
In other news I have finished crafting my Perfected Nightsword and am on to the third Twilight collection. This now involves me doing a bunch of content that I do not love… jumping puzzles and gimmicky mini-dungeons and then collecting “Gloom” in specific places. So far I have only collected Gloom from Tequatl’s lair, Shadow Behemoth, and one darkness themed mini-dungeon in Dredgehaunt Cliffs. So I have much work to go before I can craft my Dusk and begin trying to sort out what I have left to do before I can turn it into Twilight. Huge thanks to both Nogmara and Tamrielo for helping me with the Mithril because in total it came in just under 4000 ingots to finish the second step of this process. The expensive part of it was buying all of the Deldrimor Steel Ingots that I needed, but at least this part is done. The last step is more labor intensive but should not have near the gold cost associated with it.
The other day I happened to be running Tequatl early in the morning, because happenstance had made me miss the reset run the evening before. Low and behold I happened to notice that both Ammo and Sol were running it as well. I snapped a photo of me with Ammo because it honestly is not super often that we are both in the same area at the same time. I am getting super anxious to share with you her latest creation. As is often the case I have been getting periodic updates showing off progress… and I kinda griefed her this time with the inclusion of the raven mantle. However she has made short work of that challenge and it looks freaking awesome in drawn form. This is maybe going to be my favorite “Bel” that she has drawn.
Lastly I started tooling around on a Sylvari Engineer. There is something I found humorous about a plant person that is a gearhead. Originally I had a Charr Engineer, but honestly… I have to admit that as much as I like them as a people… I don’t love playing as one. Charr have the whole Tauren problem for me where they feel extremely bulky and slow. This is probably ironic considering I am playing the “Big Human” as my primary character, but Norn at least have Human motions that feel quick and nimble for their size. Sylvari is something that I am coming to appreciate the longer I have played Guild Wars 2. At first I pegged them as “Plant Elves” and you know me and my general dislike of most Elves… but they are way more interesting than that. Maybe the interesting story arc of Caithe has turned me around on my feelings about them.
The weird thing about the World Boss teleport trinket from the Black Lion shop, is that it takes you to places you don’t really have any business being yet. One of these places is to fight Drakkar, an ice dragon deep in the Bjora Marches. It is interesting seeing how this story unfolds and I feel like I am on the cusp of finally reaching this fight on the narration. There are so many excellent touches with this content, like when I met the Wolf Spirit the game acknowledged that as a Norn I was pledged to the Bear spirit and that he is proud of me. I’ve also really enjoyed the Charr homeland zone and all of the weird stuff that the various Legions get up to there. Bjora Marches has lasted much longer than I originally expected it would, so I am very interesting to see what the next zone brings with it.
Lastly today is the date that the next World of Warcraft expansion is going to be revealed. While it has been sixteen months since I last played the game, I still find myself interested in what comes next. I have a feeling that it won’t be enough to draw me back to the fold, but I also feel like I have said that before many times. I did not love Battle for Azeroth and I bounced in less than a month from Shadowlands, so I am wondering if I am just done with this game. We will see if what comes next interests me at all.
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Good Morning Friends! I had every intent of blogging yesterday but life got in the way. We had an extended internet outage and my normal backup of tethering to my phone was less than reliable. It took me until almost work time to sort out a reasonable connection, and then I got busy and never made it back to actually writing a blog post. Today would normally be a day I would consider part of the weekend, given that we are off for Good Friday… but given that I never blogged yesterday I feel like I should probably write something. It has been a good few days and am falling into some rhythms in Guild Wars 2.
One of the things that my friends will tell you is that I seem to have phenomenal luck when it comes to video games, or MMORPGs specifically. I think it is largely that I just farm content and as a result am getting more iterations of kills than the average person. They will deny this and tell you that I just have some magical power to doctor the dice rolls. Proof of this is that in less than a weeks time I have gotten two Ascended weapon drops from Tequatl, or as we call him Taco. I got the Pistol first and then later got another weapon choice chest, this time with Assassin stats instead of Settlers. I also finished up my Caladbolg questline and turned it into a Dagger giving me a full set of ascended weapons on both my Reaper and Harbinger builds. Not shown is a Greatsword that I crafted, but I am also slowly working on finishing out the Dark Harvest achievement for the Reaper Greatsword. Assassins is “close enough” and I have been too lazy to convert it to Marauder.
Since we last talked I have also finished up Living World Season 4, and I have to say the story just keeps getting better. I actually care about the characters of Dragon’s Watch, which is not a thing that I ever felt about Destiny’s Edge. I had a moment near the end of this season where I legitimately started to tear up a bit in reaction to the events that were happening. Well done Arena Net. I am looking forward to starting on Living World Season 5 today, but first I need to go up to my home town and help my parents with a few things. I am finally understanding why people were telling me this story was almost as good as Final Fantasy XIV… it just takes longer to get there. I am fully on board for wherever we are headed now.
I hope you all have a wonderful holiday weekend. I am wrapping this up so that my wife and I can go out real quick and try and restock on Reeses Peanut Butter eggs before they disappear forever… or at least until the Halloween equivalent comes out. One last thing… before I go… a parting gift. I wanted to add the profession and elite spec icons to the AggroChat chat server and struggled to find them in an easy to download form. After much sifting about I scraped a full set from the wiki, and have uploaded them to a file sharing service. These are the 200 pixel set which seemed the most useful place to start. They are archived with 7zip, which hopefully you have and if you do not… you should absolutely get. This should make it easy to add the specs to discord, slack, or any other chat software that supports custom emojis.
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Sometimes you don’t have to look terribly far to find nonsense in games… sometimes it finds you. Mistlock Sanctuary is an extremely handy place to have access to, and honestly half of the time it becomes the unofficial Guild Hall of Greysky Armada given that it tends to be where we all meet up on the regular. It is essentially a tightly condensed area that has all of the vendors and services that you might need from a town, and allows you to teleport right back to where you were before entering. It becomes a hangout spot for lots of folks within the Guild Wars 2 community, including apparently a group of Thundershrimps. I briefly joined this hivemind when I noticed there were two players glamoured to this appearance following me around the Mists… and then shortly I received an mail message with a tonic attached.
It was fun… nonsensical… and we slowly gained numbers until I believe right before I left we had six players running around as shrimp. I think this might be the highlight of my weekend and I am leading off this mornings post using it as a reminder. There are moments in MMORPGs that are completely meaningless in the scope of the game itself or your own progression… but are absolutely moments worth indulging in. The above image is from our old FC house on Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV, and that night a bunch of us just happened to be wearing the newly added Dragon Quest Slime Hat… and proceeded to dance around for thirty minutes. Moments like this is well worth indulging when they happen, and I think are good for the soul.
The other highlight of the weekend is getting a new ascended weapon for free. Since coming back I have been trying to run Tequatl as many times as possible. There are days where the stars have not aligned, but more times than not… I am running this each time the server resets. I have known for awhile that there is a very rare chance of getting ascended weapons to drop, and I believe Friday night I managed to get a Settlers chest to drop. Seeing as I had crafted a Greatsword already, I opted instead to go pistol given that I am spending so much time as Harbinger of late. I immediately took it to the mystic toilet and changed its stat package to something more reasonable for the sort of nonsense I have been doing of late. I may never actually see another of these, but it isn’t going to stop me from trying each day. I could now really use a dagger and a staff.
Another great moment from the weekend is that Sunday afternoon the stars aligned and a bunch of us ran some fractals. I needed three for the first part of the Twilight precursor quest, and Thalen needed three different ones for some other quest. I’ve decided that Fractals are more or less what Mythic+ feels like in World of Warcraft. While the Fractals themselves are shorter, the pace feels similar and the fact that they scale over time also feels similar. I really think that this was the dungeon content I had been looking for, and while Tam kept telling me that… I was bad at listening because my preconceived notions of what that meant kept getting in the way. This whole experience of coming back to Guild Wars 2 and it lighting a fire in me… has also made me realize how generally closed minded I have been when it comes to MMORPGs. If the game did not fit a specific mold that I had determined was optimized for my enjoyment… I wanted no part of it.
Lastly for the weekend I spent a good deal of time chipping away at Living World Season 4. If my theory is correct, I am nearing the end of Chapter 5 and will be starting the final chapter soon. Not every new map is a winner, but I have to say LW4 so far has had far more winners than losers. I love the intricacy of each new map, and this is honestly slowing me down in my progress because I keep getting distracted by events and metas. Admittedly this is artificially causing me to engage with the content as though it were releasing more slowly, rather than just powering through it. We talked a bit about this over the weekend, but when you are powering through things you have trouble realizing that significant chunks of time have passed in game between content drops. Essentially the expansions and Living World progress in real time, meaning that a number of years sit between the end of one expansion and the beginning of the next.
It was a pretty great weekend, albeit a pretty short one. I do need to get finishing up Horizon Forbidden West but lord it has been awhile since I have been this engaged with a game. During my months of playing Final Fantasy XIV every single day… I was deeply beholden to the mission. Were it not for my quest to get everything to level 80… I am pretty sure I would have bounced much earlier. This… I just have so many different dials and levers that I can interact with and it all feels fresh. I am sure doing Tequatl for the 200th time will start to tarnish it a bit, but I really do love the encounter. I mean I managed to do Praetorium every single day and find enjoyment it in while I was grinding out those 80s.
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